is capital punishment ever justified?

with international day against capital punishment coming up - october 10th, i am interested in your opinions on this. have just posted a similar thread on another forum and was surprised at how many american members came back with aggresive opinions on why capital punishment is correct. personally i am against it, i think it is a barbarous obscenity and should never ever be resorted to.
perhaps it is worth noting that jalal talabani, a kurdish member of the iraqi government would not sign saddams death warrant for he is opposed to capital punishment, and this coming from a man whose people were very nearly ethnically cleansed by the dictator.

I'm against it,
its never the right thing to do.

and the previous and future potential loss of innocent life cannot in any way be justified in my eyes.

I find the death penalty archaic and obscene. Some of the methods such as electrocution and hanging are horrific - capital punishment makes the state no better than murderers themselves.

'Removing' people who are innately dangerous to society is the only moral action. Keeping them incarcerated for life is less humane, releasing them to kill/rape etc not justifiable.

I would change the name so 'punishment' wasn't implied though (to explain why would mean i'd have to get into the free will debate- which nobody wants - so i'll leave it there)

Aside from any opinion I have about killing someone because they killed someone else, the fact that it isn't a deterrent to crime is one reason that I'm against it.

Im against the death penalty. No justice system is 100% correct and sadly it has become a matter of your defence being as good as your bank account. I dread to think how many people have been wrongly executed. I beleive in life inprisonment, at least that way if they turn out to be innocent there is time.

I'm against it, to me the people who execute are doing exactly the same thing and not bein punished

My wife's aunt was murdered and I can assure you that her entire family do not support the death penalty. The men that killed her never faced a court and justice has never been done in her case.
The 4 men who were there when she was shot should face justice but that justice should not be the death of any other human being.

suicide blonde if we were to put our judiciary into the shoes of the families of victims of heinous crimes and expect them to punish the criminal as the families would, there would be anarchy. with the lynching and killing of those accused without even stopping to fully consider the evidence. punishing criminals should never be about revenge, we can leave that to the mafia. and by executing criminals we show society that we as a state are no better than the criminal by committing the ultimate crime, the taking of life.
yes, some warped twisted individuals murder innocent people, but our judiciary should not then prove to be as warped and twisted by using the death penalty.
since execution has been used in this world countless innocent people have been killed, think of the birmingham six and guildford four in britain, all irishmen convicted on what seemed like cast iron proof of IRA bombings back in the seventies, of course the public bayed for their blood, for many innocent lives had been lost in these bombings, and if britain still had the death penalty they would certainly have been executed. however, they were all released many years later when at an appeal hearing they were found to be completely innocent of the crime.

sorry ben, just read your reply.
glad to hear that your family have proved that they are 'bigger' than those who committed this crime.

when the body of the victim is found in the backyard of the murderer and he then confesses in great detail to what he did, there is no chance that they have the wrong man.

initially i wasn't going to mention this, but i may as well. some years ago i lost someone i loved dearly to the hands of another. many is the day and night i cursed that man, and wished that he had received the death penalty for what he did.

i understand and respect your opinion. guess we can agree to disagree.

sorry to hear that suicide blonde. and yes we should agree to disagree.
after all if your loss had been of an innocent member of your family convicted of a crime they didn't committ you would probably feel differently.
try to watch the movie 'the life of david gayle' with kevin spacey and kate winslett. it is one i always recommend to supporters of capital punishment.
but in any case you have a right to your opinion.

Killers also plead guilty to their crimes.In those cases there is no doubt that they are in fact guilty.Baby killers,serial rapists...can't be rehabilitated.I've read hundreds of books where the killers themselves admit that if they were given the chance to be in society they would kill again.

"I KILLED SO many women I have a hard time keeping them straight,he said in a confession read aloud in King County Superior Court by a prosecutor.
Ridgway, 54, a short figure with glasses, thinning hair and a sandy mustache, pleaded guilty to more murders than any other serial killer in U.S. history.
He struck a plea agreement that will spare him from execution for those killings and will result in a sentence of life in prison without parole for one of the most baffling and chilling serial killer cases the nation has ever seen.
I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could."

Perfect example of why I will always believe there is a place for capital punishment.

Im against it and it would have to be on October the 10th that's my sons birthday.